STANT LITORE doesn’t consider his writing a vocation; he considers it an act of survival. As a youth, he witnessed the 1992 outbreak in the rural Pacific Northwest firsthand, as he glanced up from the feeding bins one dawn to see four dead staggering toward him across the pasture, dark shapes in the morning fog. With little time to think or react, he took a machete from the barn wall and hurried to defend his father’s livestock; the experience left him shaken.

Today he lives in Colorado with his wife and two daughters. Sometimes he lies awake beside his sleeping wife and listens in the night for any moan in the hills, but there is only her breathing, soft and full and a mystery of beauty beside him. He keeps his machete sharp but hopes not to use it.